It’s not impossible. To misquote a line from a song called “Ricky Don’t Lost That Number!”, “Nick has friends in Cyberspace and they’ve heard Ginny’s name”. So Lovelace might and her fellow “Daughters of the Air” are a possibility. Especially if this advances their own agenda. Another one might be considered almost a sister to Nick along with her faithful Baron. ^_^

And I do hope Ginny did indeed leave a good Yelp revlew of Madam Delphi. That might be more important then she knows. >_>

It’s possible that someone(s) have a back door into the program. It is also possible that this system of sufficient complexity (and if the VR extirpation program was made using mad science, let’s face it, it will have more than sufficient complexity) may have grown beyond Mr. Green’s ability to control or predict it. Which means the ladies of the boardwalk are the avatars of the various AI protocols keeping the whole thing running, and diverted Dr. Lee to give her a message. What their final agenda is, is up for speculation at this point.

I can’t take full credit for that suggestion. There were a couple others who had posited that idea shortly before I did. The main difference being that I have always believed that Virginia was already Mad, whereas others believe that she is only now about to cross over.

Thinking on it….why are they bothering with this? I mean, Anasigma will just shoot you for improper polish on your shoes. Exterpation works well as a threat that no-one knows the details of, but the actual mechanics could easily just be “take them out back, shoot them, dump the body in the mystery meat grinder.”

I’m pretty sure extirpation is for people who are too _valuable_ to simply kill. Dr. Lee’s contributions to their current plan can’t be underestimated. She gave them a weather machine and helped work on many of their other projects. Essentially Extirpation allows you to not kill the goose while there’s a chance you convince it to lay another golden egg or two.

What I want to know is why they bother with VR instead of just sticking them in a secret jail, but I assume they think this is harder to escape and they’ve been dealing with mad science so long they’re starting to rely on it.

The only thing A-Sig got from Whimsy was the mind control software. Baron Mistycorn got their VR server as a “parting gift”. This VR world – by her own admission above – was created at least in part by Virginia herself.

**blinkblink** Where did the coffees come from? —wait, wait, duhhh, they’re simulated; they faded in with a flare of pixelation, of course. Hope they’re not decaf; if you have to be in a virtual world, you shouldn’t have to drink decaf.

I would argue that there are two levels higher than root access: physical access, and hardware design. If someone has physical access, they can always shut down the hardware, isolate it, and reboot/reinstall if they don’t like what a root-level user is doing. If they design the hardware, they can include unfixable backdoors to later gain root access, and lie about it to almost any software queries except those acknowledged by the original designer.

A valid point. But from an operating standpoint, root access is still the highest level. True, physical access gives you the ability to shut down the hardware, but to actually do anything in the system, you still need root access. Without that, the only way to keep someone else out would be to keep the hardware shut down. So physical access is operationally lower than root access. And design merely gives you the ability to add back doors that give you root access even if normal paths have been cut off. It also allows you to make true root access hidden, so what anyone else thinks is root level is actually one level down – effectively giving you access to a “god mode” that no one else knows exists.